Brianna N Hernandez

Dissertation Project

Towards a Feminist Environmentalism: Entangled Ecologies of Environment and Equality in Conservation

Climate change is one of the widest ranging problems the international community has ever tried to govern. The scope of problems under the purview of global environmental governance is expanding. The number and types of actors in the space are as well. Environmental problems do not respect the territorial boundaries drawn on a map. Thus, while international agreements, conferences, and protocols serve a significant purpose, non-state actors also play a large role in meeting environmental degradation and governance challenges.^[1] Within the global climate change regime (GCCR), there has been a turn to gender equality as a parallel goal of sustainability.

Scholarship has demonstrated that discourses influence the global and organizational policies we imagine will be effective in addressing issues. Applying a gender-lens to these discourses allow us to further investigate how negotiations of goals and concepts work to better understand the role of constructed gender binaries and the impacts had on all peoples – as well as work to revise discourses within the climate change regime. While scholarship and policy making is not often gender-neutral, it is often gender-blind or gender-essentialist. “Often and in subtle ways women’s interaction and politics suffer from reproducing prevailing structures of omission and objectification,” so there is need for thoughtful investigations into the relationship(s) between gender and the environment to better address major issues of common concern.^[2] 

The aim is to bring together the theoretical frameworks of feminism and environmentalism with the particulars of governance structures to investigate the extent to which the global climate change regime has included women and girls in its policies and practices.

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. The first part has a theoretical goal of advancing scholarship towards conceptualizing a feminist environmentalism. The second part is more practical in nature and concerned with conceptualizations and practices of global frameworks and conservation and climate action organizations in their work at the (self-described) nexus of women’s equality and environmental stewardship.

“Feminists [are] bridge builders between thinking and action in ecology and development and in indigenous-inspired social movements and development alternatives.”^[3]  This dissertation will bring together threads of feminism and environmentalism with the particulars of governance structures within environmentally focused organizations to investigate the extent to which the global climate regime has included women and girls – – and, perhaps, reproduced problematic binaries and hierarchies in the process. This is of interest to academics, practitioners, and activists as many organizations and movements are grappling with how feminism and environmentalism hang together. It is a goal of this dissertation to contribute to a non-essentialist framework for a gender-aware/responsive global climate change regime. In order to do so, this work performs an act of advocacy in through investigating and voicing a need for a situated, contextual, and gendered environmentalism.

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[1] Kurk Dorsey. “Crossing Boundaries: The Environment in International Relations,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Andrew Isenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 691.

[2] Braidotti, Rosi, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Hausler, and Saskia Wieringa, eds. Women, the environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis (ZED Books, 1994), 175.

[3] Baksh-Soodeen, Rawwida, Wendy Harcourt, Diane Rocheleau, and Padini Nirmal. “Feminist Political Ecologies: Grounded, Networked and Rooted on Earth .” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, 793–814. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015.